Phil Mushnick TERRIBLE 10
Examples of lack of perspective across sports requires long list EQUAL TIME
MAN — provided you identify as one — it grows more insane by the day. Even my influence with influencers has been canceled. If only flat-earther Kyrie Irving had been right, we’d have fallen off an edge by now. So drop down and give me 10! 1. Where do we start, today? Well, “A” is for Alabama. Just-retired ’Bama football coach Nick Saban said last week, “What we have now is not college football — not college football as we know it. You hear someone say, ‘studentathlete.’ That doesn’t exist.”
No fooling? When did Saban bump into that awakening? How many tens of millions of dollars in salary later did he reach that conclusion? Only after he retired he discovered that a fundamental education is not required to be recruited and enrolled on full scholarship to football-frenzied universities?
Does Saban mean to tell us that the dozens of his recruits who were arrested — once, four in one bust — for assorted high crimes and misdemeanors may not have had any legitimate reason to be enrolled at Alabama other than to win games for him?
Is he suggesting that Henry Ruggs III — star receiver on Saban’s 2017-18 national championship team and a first-round NFL draft pick by the Raiders and now doing hard time for a 156 mph DWI homicide — left Alabama worse than when he entered?
Does Saban mean it’s all a con? Gee, who knew? He’s with ESPN now, where he can speak of “halftime adjustments” then call it a day.
2. Last week, N.Y. Congressman Jamaal Bowman — admitted puller of a false fire alarm in the U.S. Capitol Building, no less — defended his decision to have school kids honor convicted police murderer Joanne Chesimard, now Assata Shakur, on the friendly lam in Cuba.
That ambushed, shot-dead N.J. State Trooper Werner Foerster, 34, had a wife and 3-year-old son didn’t matter to Bowman. After all, it wasn’t his family. Nor, for that matter, Nike’s and its billboardchampioned Colin Kaepernick.
Among Chesimard/Shakur’s donors and biggest supporters was Kaepernick, who was fully embraced by Nike, Communist China’s business partner that continues to call many of the shots in all of our sports.
Meanwhile, and mostly for worse, Nike and its swoosh continue to intrude on MLB uniforms. Our sports authorities have allowed Nike money to become their catnip.
3. On the subject of those who must bow to Nike while otherwise lecturing us on what’s wrong with the world, LeBron James apparently doesn’t care if intelligent folks, as opposed to pandering media, see right through his garbage.
In January, James boasted that his son, Bronny, a freshman at USC, is already NBA-ready. “He could play for us now, easy!”
Last week he was upset with mock drafts that had Bronny listed as a second-rounder: “Can y’all please just let the kid be a kid and enjoy college basketball?” Gee, ya don’t say? 4. As winning, logic-based Major League Baseball continues its descent, we can’t say that new Yankee Juan Soto, in claiming that he idolized Robinson Cano, didn’t warn us.
Last week Soto hit one deep, immodestly posing at the plate then having to bust it to reach second as it was one of those home runs, the kind Aaron Boone, among many new-age big league managers, allow and even excuse.
And gee, there was Giancarlo Stanton, another overpaid underachiever who might’ve told Soto that twice he was lost for several weeks due to bad slides into second after delaying at the plate to stare.
5. The Yanks now have an MITtrained analytics expert, another to remind us to ignore what we see to believe what’s read off a computer screen. Observational, commonsense baseball, the kind that would sustain the presence of a pitcher who “has it” on any particular day — say, a Don Larsen — has been lost to the Power of Perhaps.
Gonna be a lot more for Michael Kay to ignore this season.
6. The Rangers have scheduled another Pride Night game for Sunday. Another invitation to create or advance more sanctioned social divisiveness for no on-demand reason.
If a team — any pro team — denies anyone — gays, Estonians, atheists, Mao Marxists, transgender NCAA record-breaking swimmers, green-haired grandmothers, Uncle Leo — entry to a game based on their race, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, politics, biological birth or hairdresser, then we’ve reason to devote a game to the specifically oppressed.
To his lasting, pandering shame, Manfred last year allowed the Dodgers to honor a cult of Catholics-bashing, cross-dressing males in nuns’ garb as their honored Pride Game guests. Manfred also allowed specious, politically wishful claims that Georgia’s new election laws were of the racist, Jim Crow kind that would prevent blacks from voting thus he removed the All-Star Game from 50 percent black Atlanta to mostly white Denver, remains a pandering knee-jerk decision for which MLB has never been held accountable. Did it not matter that a record total of blacks soon voted in Georgia? But MLB decided to relent to racial pressure. 7. Matt Barnes — an annually expendable publicly vulgar, N-wordspewing antagonist throughout his onand off-court NBA career — naturally fit the form to co-host his own TV show on Paramount/ CBS’s Showtime, where he continued his dumpster-driven conduct on TV.
Last week, after creating a courtside hassle when one of his sons was called for a technical in a high school game, the NBA Kings dropped Barnes as a TV analyst. Why the Kings hired him in the first place makes for more modern lunacy.
8. Also last week, Richard Sherman, another recidivist NFL reprobate who TV execs deemed a must-have, was arrested for suspicion of DUI.
That two years ago he was arrested for DUI and resisting arrest after his in-law’s family called police to report he was trying to force his way into their house — he pleaded to two reduced misdemeanor charges — didn’t matter. Last season he was as an analyst on the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.”
9. That anyone with reasonable forethought knew that NIL payments and bidding wars would further drive college sports to financial farce and fraud — full free rides, cash Pell Grants and six years to graduate aren’t enough — the Florida High School Athletic Association is on the verge of approving NIL payment to high school athletes.
That would allow kids to become the targets of bidding wars, transfer inducements and other enticements that don’t include the ability to read, write, add and subtract. Parents, if available for counsel, will be able to place their kids up for auction. Have we all gone nuts?
10. Nets team owner Joe “Follow the Money” Tsai last week declared the NBA “is in a very good place” with Communist, fundamental freedoms-forbidding China and would “love” to resume playing NBA games in Red China.
Of course he does. The Taiwanese-Canadian billionaire is chairman of the high-tech Alibaba firm, which is reliant on China for profit. But Taiwan is a democracy that China vows to annex by force? So what? That’s what China’s prisons are for. Don’t much think that Kyrie Irving owns a world globe. A map? Well, they’re flat.